November 05, 2024 / by Yuri Roskov

The first data manager of the Catalogue of Life

The Catalogue of Life Consortium mourns the tragic loss of Monalisa Cachuela-Palacio, who passed away on 13th October 2024. She was a wonderful person, a highly professional colleague and our nice friend. Mona was in our team at the very beginning of the Catalogue of Life.

The image is showing Mona visiting the Catalogue of Life office at the University of Reading (Reading, UK), on the 9th of November 2004 (seated Frank Bisby, Monalisa Cachuela-Palacio; standing Yury Roskov, Susanah Kimani, Pamela Harling).

Monalisa joined the Species 2000 project in 2001 as the Catalogue of Life data manager, working at the WorldFish Center Philippine Office in Los Baños. She pioneered the new field of biodiversity informatics by creating the Catalogue database from a variety of taxonomic data sets. Monalisa assembled the first five Annual Checklists from the 2nd edition in 2002 to the 5th edition in 2006 of the Catalogue of Life. Under her data management, the Catalogue grew from 242,269 accepted species to 884,552 species. Mona left Catalogue of Life in 2006 to undertake a fellowship in New Zealand.

Monalisa has summed up her experience of the Catalogue assembly nicely in the paper Towards an index of all known species: the Catalogue of Life, its rationale, design and use. Integrative Zoology, 2006, 1(1): 18-21.

We will all keep Mona’s sweet smile in our hearts.